Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

224 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
STYLIZED THEATRE
Although endlessly diverse, antirealistic theatre artists
all insist on transforming reality into a larger-than-life
theatrical experience. We can thus refer to the entire
spectrum of nonrealistic modern theatre as stylized. Of
course, theatre of all eras have had distinctive styles,
but those in earlier times were largely imposed by thencurrent
conventions while more recent dramatists have
consciously selected and created styles to satisfy their
aesthetic theories, their social principles, or simply their
desire for novelty and innovation.
The techniques of antirealistic theater come from
anywhere and everywhere: from the past, from distant
cultures, and from present and futuristic technologies.
Present-day theatre artists have unprecedented reservoirs
of sources to draw upon and are generally unconstrained
by political, religious, or artistic traditions. Almost anything
can now be put upon a stage, and in the twenty-first
century it seems that almost everything is.
Antirealistic theatre does not altogether dispense
with reality, however. Rather, it wields it in often unexpected
ways and enhances it with symbol and metaphor.
Further, it makes explicit use of the theatre’s very theatricality
to remind its audience members that they are
watching a performance, not an episode in somebody’s
daily life.
In the stylized theatre, characters usually represent
more than individual persons or personality types. Like
medieval allegories, modern stylized plays often involve
figures who represent forces of nature, moral positions,
human instincts, and the like—entities such as death,
fate, idealism, the life force, the earth mother, the tyrant
father, or the prodigal son. The conflicts associated
with these forces, unlike the conflicts of realism, do not
reflect human behavior. More often than not, they represent
permanent discords in the human condition. The
stylized theatre resonates with tension and frustration in
the face of irreconcilable demands.
But that is not to say the antirealistic theatre is inevitably
grim. On the contrary, it often uses whimsy and
wit. Although the themes of the antirealistic theatre may
sound dark—the alienation of humanity, the futility of
communication, the loss of innocence, the inevitability
of despair—it is not necessarily fueled by pessimism or
outrage. Indeed, the glory of the stylized theatre is that,
at its best, it aims to entertain. Antirealism was born in
a time of despair and doubt, but it transcends frustration
to celebrate the victory of poetry over alienation, comedy
over noncommunication, and artistry over despair.
The antirealistic theatre aims at lifting its audience, not
saddling them. Even if it proffers no solutions to life’s
inevitable discords, it can provide us with a greater lucidity
on the human adventure. To help us understand the
diversity of stylized theatre that results from this philosophy,
we will examine brief examples from plays written
over the past hundred-plus years that establish the main
lines of the antirealistic theatre.
Surrealism and the Avant-Garde: Ubu Roi The
opening of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (King Ubu) at the
Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris on December 10, 1896, was
perhaps the most violent dramatic premiere in theatre
history. The audience shouted, whistled, hooted, cheered,
threw things, and shook their fists at the stage. Duels
broke out after subsequent performances. The avantgarde
was born.
The term avant-garde comes from the military, where
it refers to the advance battalion, or the “shock troops”
that initiate a major assault. In France the term initially
described the wave of French playwrights and directors
who openly and boldly assaulted realism in the first four
decades of the twentieth century. Today the term is used
worldwide to describe any adventurous, experimental,
and nontraditional artistic effort.
Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), a diminutive rebel
(“eccentric to the point of mania and lucid to the point
of hallucination,” says critic Roger Shattuck), unleashed
his radical shock troops from the moment the curtain
rose. Jarry had called for an outrageously antirealistic
stage—painted scenery depicting a bed with a bare
tree at its foot; palm trees with a coiled boa constrictor
around one of them; a gallows with a hanging skeleton;
and falling snow. Characters entered through a painted
fireplace. Costumes, in Jarry’s words, were “divorced
as far as possible from [realistic] color or chronology.”
And the title character stepped forward to begin the play
with a word that quickly became immortal: “Merdre!”
or “Shrit!”
This mot d’Ubu (“Ubu’s word”) more than anything
else, occasioned scandal, for although Ibsen had broken
barriers of propriety in subject matter, no playwright
had yet tested barriers of tasteful language. Vulgar
epithets, common enough in the works of Aristophanes
and Shakespeare, had been pruned from the theatre in
the Royal era and abolished entirely in the lofty spirit
of romanticism; far from trying to sneak them back in,
Jarry simply threw them up in the face of the astonished
audience. The added “r” in merdre (or, in translation, the